The announcement of Teagan Levi’s signing with the NRLW and the Gold Coast Titans on Monday morning should have surprised exactly no one. Not because of rumours of tension within the group, or any mismanagement from Rugby Australia, but purely because that’s how women’s sport – particularly between the rival rugby codes – is in Australia.
But that could soon end.
Since the establishment of Super Rugby Women’s, NRLW and the Australian women’s sevens program, the signing, re-signing and code-hopping of athletes between both codes has been akin to the wild west. Short-term contracts with both codes supplementing each other, as players – rightfully – chased the best deals. But with RA understood to be within months of turning the Wallaroos programme fulltime, aligning with the sevens programme, the lawlessness of the wild west could soon have guardrails.
Already we’ve seen the first steps to establishing those guardrails.
After Teagan and her sister Maddi re-signed with RA in January on two-year deals, it was revealed a new contract clause was included – the ability to take a short-term ‘sabbatical’ and sign on with an NRLW club during the Australian sevens offseason. It’s the first to appear in the women’s game.
While Maddi has chosen not to take up the option, her 22-year-old sister did. She has the full blessing from the sporting body and her long-time coach Tim Walsh to forgo the sevens offseason and play rugby league from July through to September. Giving the Olympian several months to prepare for another gruelling SVNS circuit, and then the run to the LA Olympics in 2028.
Levi’s code switch was followed by Wallaroos forward Ash Marsters just days later on a two-year deal, while former Wallaroos teammates Bella McKenzie and Layne Morgan have also made the switch for 2027.
Both Marsters and Morgan were offered tier one Wallaroos contracts after last year’s Rugby World Cup. Those contracts would have pushed their annual salary as high as $100k a year, according to a source with knowledge of the contracting space.
While the NRLW continues to hunt for rugby talent to bolster their ranks, not everyone has been able to make the switch with reports sevens stars Maddie Ashby and Faith Nathan have been blocked by RA from signing with the rival code.
Off contract in September, RA is keen to re-sign the key duo ahead of the LA Olympics. The governing body’s decision not to allow the pair to exit their contracts early appears then to be a clear line in the sand moment.
Ashby, the current Australian women’s sevens captain, suffered an horrific injury that saw her not only tear her ACL but also damage much of her knee, ruling her out of the 2024 Olympics. It saw her sidelined for 484 days, only returning to the SVNS circuit for the 2025-2026 series. If she was to suffer another long-term injury during the 11-round NRLW competition, it could not only hinder Ashby’s hopes of reaching the LA Olympics but also derail the side’s preparations leading to the tournament.
The risk of injury aside, it appears RA is sending a message to its players; that being that the players have signed a full-time contract with RA, and that comes with expectations to perform at the highest level and follow the contract’s terms.
Given the side’s results of late, the timing of the request couldn’t be worse. Of the seven SVNS series events they’ve played this season, Australia’s women claimed only one gold medal, a title in Cape Town early in the series. They’ve otherwise lost six finals, including five straight, to their trans-Tasman rivals New Zealand.
Off the back of two disappointing Olympic campaigns that saw Australia fail to medal in both Tokyo and France, the pressure is on the team to find results.
Meanwhile, the Wallaroos, who have continually pushed for further investment from the sporting body, will soon get what they asked for with RA CEO Phil Waugh announcing the programme will go fulltime from next year ahead of the 2029 Rugby World Cup that will be hosted in Australia.
Speaking to media after RA spruiked its incredible financial results, Waugh revealed the organisation was already within the top four countries in regards to investment of the 15s program, while he was pointed in his remarks that results were yet to follow.
“We’re very confident [of going fulltime],” Waugh said in April. “We’re in the top three to four countries in the world in terms of our women’s 15s investment and we still haven’t seen those results on the field come through and flow through.
“We’re really conscious that we’ve got a very successful women’s sevens program that essentially led women’s professional sport in Australia when they were established in 2014, a centralised program went through 2016, we won the gold medal.
“We need to have that same aspiration with our Wallaroos in the fact that we bring them together centralised program, better cohesion, continuity, and then the performances increase from there.”
Hammered in all three Pac4 clashes against the USA, Canada and the Black Ferns, the Wallaroos’ results have gone backwards to start the year, with several players returning to the programme for the start of the season short on conditioning. That winless run followed and underwhelming performance at last year’s World Cup in England, where Australia managed only one win and only just scraped into the quarterfinals.
The expectation will be that those results improve dramatically with a fulltime move into professionalism, while the sevens cohort is expected to maintain the lion’s share of its top talent in the face of the NRLW threat.
With the integrated programme set to begin from next year, 2028 then looms as one of the biggest years in Australian women’s rugby with the LA Olympics and the run into a home World Cup in 2029. While the Levi sisters may have been afforded sabbatical clauses earlier this year, it’s unlikely many other players will be given such a luxury, with RA keen to lockdown their talent for what should be the start of a golden generation.
